about her.

Ann was in New York. Wayne had said, and Katie agreed with him, that
Chicago was not the place for her to start in anew. She had gone through
too many hard things there. And Katie was glad for other reasons. With
Wayne in Washington, she would have no more occasion to be in the
middle-west and Ann would be too far away in Chicago.

But Katie was looking desperately homesick at that thought of having no
more occasion to be in the middle-west.

The man who mended the boats was still out there, mending boats and
finishing his play, which she knew now was to be about the army. One
reason he had wanted to mend boats there was that he might know some of
the men who worked in the shops at the Arsenal, interested in that
relation of labor to militarism.

For two months Katie had heard nothing from him. In those first months
he, too, seemed helpless before it, seemed to understand that Katie's
feeling was a thing he could not hope to understand--much less, change.

Then there rose in him the impulse to fight, for her, against it all,
stir her to fight.

"Katie," he wrote in that first letter, letter she was re-reading that
night, "we have seen two sides of the same thing. Our two visions,
experiences, have roused in us two very different emotions. Does that
mean it must kill for us what we have said is the biggest
emotion--experience--the greatest joy and brightest hope life has
brought us?

"We're both bound by it. I by the hurt it's brought me, you by the
happiness; I by the hate it roused, you by the love that lingers round
it. Are we going to make no efforts to set ourselves free? Are we so much
of the past that the institutions of the past and the experiences and
prejudices of those institutions can shut us out from the future and from
each other?

"Katie, you have the rich gift of the open mind. I don't believe that,
lastingly, there's anything you'll shut out as impossible to consider.
Your eyes say it, Katie--say they'll look at everything, and just as
fairly as they can. Oh they're such honest, fearless, just eyes--so wise
and so tender. And it was I--I who love them so--brought that awful look
of hurt to those wonderful eyes. Katie--I want to spend all of my life
keeping that hurt look from those dear eyes!

"You're asked to do a hard thing, dear Katie. It's cruel it should be
_you_ so hard a thing is asked of. Asked to look at a thing you see
through the feeling of a lifetime as though seeing i